Traducción Ponga el acento en sus fortalezas terminada y corregida

Harvard Bussines Review

Latin America

Place the accent on your strengths

By Laura Morgan Roberts, Gretchen Spreitzer,
Jane Dutton, Robert Quinn, Emily Heaphy and Brianna Barker

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January 2005[pic 2]

Reprint  r0501g-e

You may obtain more by developing your talents and enhancing your innate abilities than trying to correct your weaknesses. Here it is a systematic way to discover who you are in your best side.

Place the accent on your strengths

By Laura Morgan Roberts, Gretchen Spreitzer,
Jane Dutton, Robert Quinn, Emily Heaphy and Brianna Barker

Most of the time, feedback emphasizes the negative aspect. During formal employee evaluations, discussions invariably focus on "areas of improvement", even if the overall assessment is highly favorable. Informally, the sting of criticism lasts longer than the balm of compliment. Several studies have shown people pay close attention to negative information. For instance, when people are asked to recall some significant emotional event, they evoke four negative memories for every positive memory. It is not surprising that most executives deliver and receive performance assessments with the same enthusiasm of a child going to the dentist.

Traditional and corrective feedback is useful, of course; every organization must filter their poor employees and ensure that everybody performs at an expected level of competition. Unfortunately, the feedback that exposes flaws can lead talented executives to invest too much fortifying or hiding their perceived weaknesses, or to impose themselves a mold that does not fit them. Paradoxically, that focus on problematic areas prevent companies getting the best performance of its people. After all, it is rare the football player who works well in any position. Why would a center striker strive to develop his skill as defense?

The alternative, as Gallup Organization researchers Marcus Buckingham, Donald Clifton and others have suggested, is to promote excellence of the center striker identifying and exploiting his unique strengths. It is a paradox of human psychology that, while people recall criticism, responds to compliments. The first ones make them defensive and therefore adverse to change, while the second ones generate confidence and the desire to perform in a better way. Executives developing their strengths can reach their highest potential. This positive approach expects not to ignore or deny the problems identified by the traditional mechanisms of feedback. Rather, it offers a separate and unique feedback experience which offsets the negative information. It allows executives to take advantage of strengths that may or may not be aware and contribute more to their organizations.

In recent years, we have developed a powerful tool to help people understand and strengthen their individual talents. Called Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise, our method allows executives to develop a “the best of you” sense to increase their future potential. The RBS exercise is just an example of new approaches that are emerging from a research field called Positive Organizational Study (POS). Like how psychologists know that people respond better to compliments than criticism, the POS researchers are discovering that when companies focus on positive attributes, such as resilience and trust, they can obtain impressive economics incomes (to learn more about this research, see “positive organization” figure). Thousand executives, as future leaders enrolled in business schools around the world, have completed RBS exercise.

In the next pages, we will do a step by step through RBS exercise and will describe the perceptions and results of it. Before proceeding, we want to make some warnings. First, you must understand that this tool is not designed to feed your ego, but to assist you to develop a plan to act more efficiently. Second, lessons generated by RBS exercise can elude you if you do not pay genuine attention. If you are too exhausted by time and job demands, you could just save the information and forget about it. To be effective, the exercise requires commitment, diligence and monitoring. Even, it can be useful to have a coach to keep you focused. Third, it is important doing it in a different time of the year than the traditional performance assessment, so that negative feedback from traditional mechanisms does not interfere with exercise results.

Correctly used, RBS exercise can help you to make use of unknown and unexplored potential areas. Provided with a constructive and systematical process to gather and analyze information about your best self, you can improve your performance at work.  

Step 1

Identify your interlocutor and ask for feedback

The first task in this exercise is to gather feedback from a variety of people inside and outside your work place. By gathering information from a wide range of sources -such as relatives, old and current colleagues, friends, teachers and so on- you can develop a much broader and richer comprehension of yourself rather than through a standard performance assessment.

        As we describe the process of the Reflected Better Self exercise, we will highlight the experience of Robert Duggan (not his real name), whose self-discovery process is typical of the executives we have observed. After finishing a successful career in the armed forces at an early age, and having obtained an MBA from a renowned business school, Robert took on a mid-management position in an IT services company. Despite his solid credentials and leadership expertise, Robert was stuck in the same position year after year. His performance reviews were generally good, but not solid enough to put him on a high potential path. Aloof, frustrated and downhearted, Robert was overwhelmed and disappointed with his company. His work day looked increasingly more like an episode of Survivor.

        Looking to improve his performance, Robert enrolled in an executive education program and did the RBS exercise. As part of the latter, he gathered feedback from 11 people from his past and present that knew him well. He selected a diverse, though well balanced, group: his wife and two other relatives, two friends from his MBA program, two colleagues from his army times and four current colleagues.

Then, Robert asked these individuals to provide information about their strengths, giving specific examples of moments when he used those strengths in a significant way to them, to their families or teams, or to their organizations. Many people, Robert among them, feel uncomfortable when asking about positive feedbacks exclusively to their colleagues. Used to hearing about their strengths or weaknesses simultaneously, many executives imagine that any positive feedback will be unrealistic, or even false. Some of the executives are also worried that the interlocutors can interpret the request as arrogant. But once they accept that the exercise will help to improve their performance.

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